Maemo Central - The MeeGo Blog

N900 Homescreen Setup Ideas & Tricks

Vaibhav Sharma — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:04:09 +0000

One really nice aspect of the the N900 is its four completely customizable screens, but setting them up sometimes becomes a problem. You keep wondering if there is nicer, more efficient or better looking way of placing your bookmarks, shortcuts, contacts and widgets.

For those of you who like a organized homescreen, the sheer fluidity of the setup process sometimes makes it difficult to align those icons symmetrically. This post aims to fix, that. First is an amazing application called Tweakr (available from the extras-devel) that allows icons to snap to a grid, you can even set the grid size.

Now that the grid layout is out of the way, lets get on to homescreen ideas. There is a wonderful ‘Show off your Maemo 5 screenshots‘ thread from where I have extracted the following homscreens to help spread a few homescreen setup ideas.

Complete credit to the original uploaders of the above screenshots. Have a layout you are especially proud of? Do share.

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Register & Log Into Meego.com With Your Maemo.org Account

Vaibhav Sharma — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:25:24 +0000

In an effort to ease the process of migrating the Maemo.org community over to Meego.com, logging in via OpenID has been introduced. This way you will not need to create a new account on Meego and it would become easy to link your existing Maemo.org account to Meego. If you have already created an account on Meego, even then you can use Maemo.org’s OpenID to link your old account.

If you are wondering what OpenID is, check this link out.

Using Maemo.org account to create new MeeGo login via Open ID

1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.

2. Go to http://meego.com/user/login and select Log in using OpenID

3. Confirm your identity at the Maemo.org screen.

If you have an existing MeeGo registration, you can associate your maemo.org ID to it.

1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.

2. Log in to your http://meego.com account and go to My account

3. Under OpenID identities enter your maemo.org OpenID from step 1.

4. Press Add an OpenID button and then Confirm on the Maemo.org authorization screen.

Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.

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Grr Is A Fast & Light Google Reader Application For The N900

Vaibhav Sharma — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:32:00 +0000

If you are looking for a Google Reader application for the N900, I recommend giving Grr by Jan Dumon a try, considering that it has just been released it is a little short on functionality such as starring a post, sharing it and so on but it works well if you are looking for a speedy way to simply browse your RSS feeds on the go. It is in the extras-devel repository (here’s how to easily enable it, the usual warnings apply).

Once you enter your Google Reader username and password Grr immediately loads your subscribed feeds with an indicator showing the number of unread posts from each website.

You can set it to display only those sites while have new content, force a refresh or log into a separate account.

Here tapping on the arrow next to the website’s name you get an option to mark all items as read. A simple tap, opens the relevant post.

Text is loaded immediately, while the images take a little time depending on the connection you are on.

Here you have the option of keeping the post unread or opening it in the browser. I would have liked at option to star posts as well, but that will probably come in a future release.

Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.

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How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900

Vaibhav Sharma — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:47:45 +0000

There is no call blocking application for the N900 yet, but that hasn’t stopped Vinu Thomas from coming up with a hack that lets you do just that. He clearly mentions that this is a stop gap arrangement until until steps up to create a real application with this functionality. What I’d like is an SMS blocking app as well, as SMS spam has really increased over the last one year or so.

Anyway, if you are being plagued by unwanted callers and have had enough, here’s how to get rid of them.

The first thing you need is root access. So go ahead and download rootsh from the application manager or use this link.

Next, if you haven’t installed a Python application in your phone, you’ll need to install maemo-python-device-env from extras-devel (here is how to enable extras-devel with one click).

Now download this script. Inside the zip is a file callblock.py. Once you open it in notepad or whatever you like, it will look like the picture below.

Now edit the ‘Blocklist’ in the script and put in the numbers you want to block. You can add as many number as you like, just make sure that you enclose the numbers within the quote and separate each with a comma. Also, do not have a trailing comma after the last number.

Save and transfer this file (callblock.py) to the MyDocs folder on the N900.

Open terminal on the device and enter the root mode by entering:

root

Next start the call block hack by entering:

python /home/user/MyDocs/callblock.py &

That’s it. All your unwanted calls are now blocked. You will need to run this script everytime you restart your device as there is no auto start functionality yet. Edit the block list in the callblock.py file anytime you want to change the blacklisted numbers. In case you have any doubts, hit Vinu’s My Nokia World to ask him.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click

Vaibhav Sharma — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:23:36 +0000

N900 users have been able to change their boot screens for a while, but earlier it involved tinkering with code and that meant you needed to know how to use the terminal to get this to work, not anymore. Valério Valério has published an application called BootScreen that lets you change your N900 boot video with a single click and requires no hacking skills.

All you need to do is install BootScreen from the extras-devel repository in the N900 Application Manager (here is how to enable it with one click), transfer the boot video you want to set to the N900 and select it from within the application.

Simply transfer the boot video of your choice to the N900, then select options by tapping the ‘BootScreen’ menu and click on add.

Next select the boot video from where you have saved it. Make sure it has a one word name only.

You will see it added in the list. Here you can move it up or down to set play order if you want to play more than one boot video. To select a video for playback on bootup, it has to be selected/highlighted. Tapping on the video name toggles the highlight.

You can even choose to have a random boot video from the options or remove one altogether.

There are a number of N900 boot videos on the internet, YouTube has previews to a lot of them and a download link in the sidebar. Here’s the one I am using, and a link to download it.

Here are links to a few others – 1, 2, 3 and you can lookup this thread for more.

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This Time Its The Turn Of Ubuntu Mobile To Run On The N900

Vaibhav Sharma — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:29:47 +0000

The story of the N900 and other operating systems continues, after running Android, Win NT 4.0, Win 3.11, Win 95, Win 98, Debian & Mer it has taken on Ubuntu Mobile this time, Ubuntu Mobile 9.04 with LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) desktop specifically.

The port has been carried out by @lifenexus by modifying the N810 method. It is running on top of Mer, and has been installed natively on the micro SD card. The phone offers a bootmenu at startup where you can choose whether you you want to boot into Mer or Maemo. Unlike some of the other OS’s this one’s running at a pretty reasonable speed as well, charging, WIFI and limited keyboard operation is present, and obviously you cannot make calls within it. At this rate whether or not Nokia decides to give MeeGo to the N900 will become immaterial, the community will take of itself.

Note: This is not Ubuntu Mobile per se, but more of MER + LXDE.

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N900 Hack Pauses The Media Player When You Unplug The Headphones

Vaibhav Sharma — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:34:04 +0000

How many times have you wanted your Nokia device to pause the media player when the headphones are pulled out? Not only does this keep your music taste private, it also saves you from possible embarrassment when the headphones come out accidentally and the phone starts blaring loudly.

Fortunately there’s a small application called ‘Headphone Daemon’ that lets you do just that. I’ve tested the application on myself and it works perfectly, the music player is paused instantaneously. It doesn’t even play for an extra second. To download this app, enable the extras-devel repository on the N900 if you already haven’t. (Here’s how to do it with one click.)

Look for ‘Headphone Daemon’ under ‘Multimedia’ and install it. Enjoy. Kudos to Thomas Perl for the hack. It works with the default Media Player, Mplayer and Panucci.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

PhotoTranslator: N900 App That Extracts & Translates Text From Images

Vaibhav Sharma — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:48:29 +0000

I’ve just stumbled on an incredible application for the N900 that can translate text from images into various languages. So in a foreign country you can simply take a picture of a boarding/sign/menu, put a box around the text and the application will extract that text and translate it for you.

The knowledge about the existence of this app comes from a video uploaded by CybercomLab on YouTube, this does not look like a community project and my guess is that we should be seeing it on the Ovi Store soon. Here’s the application’s ‘official’ description from the YouTube page:

Imagine yourself walking on a street somewhere in a foreign country and you face a warning sign, but you have no idea what it says. Just take a picture of the sign and open it with PhotoTranslator, crop the text in the sign and PhotoTranslator translates the text to your language. In addition the PhotoTranslator can be used also for translating copy/pasted or typed text, not just for text from pictures.

Enjoy!

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Its Official: Nokia Is Dropping The Maemo 6 Brand

Vaibhav Sharma — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:23:05 +0000

At the MeeGo announcement there wasn’t much clarity on whether Nokia was going to keep the ‘Maemo 6′ brand for now and then transition into MeeGo, but a simple post from Quim Gil, of Nokia’s Maemo Division requesting the renaming of the Maemo 6 / Harmattan sub forum at Maemo.org to MeeGo / Harmattan has brought much needed clarity to the picture.

In addition to the request he has taken the time to clarify a few aspects which I am sure all of you are very interested in. Below are a few extracts from his post, nothing surprising but still worth a read.

“Maemo 6 will not be used by Nokia as a brand since all the marketing effort around the software platform will be around MeeGo.

To be clear: this is not about “ditching” or “abandoning” any platform. The Harmattan program keeps working with the same plans than last week, no matter the name of the product they will deliver. Maemo 6 and Moblin 2.x merge and have a successor called MeeGo. Current Maemo people will look at it and will say “looks like his mother!”. Current Mblin people will look at it and will say “looks like his father!” (or choose your preferred gender) Of course you will see changes compared to Maemo 5, but these changes were coming anyway with Maemo 6.

What does this mean exactly for Harmattan/MeeGo? It means different things for different people:

For end users nothing really changes, apart from a name most of them were not aware of anyway.

For application developers not much changes. Harmattan’s developer offering is based on Qt 4.6 + Qt Creator, Web Runtime + Aptana. Same for MeeGo and btw same for Symbian. Harmattan *might* have extended APIs unique to Nokia devices (e.g. Ovi APIs), but we’ll see and this is part of the MeeGo flexibility anyway. Wait for the SDKs to be released and then we can discuss in more detail. There will be also the APIs available for those willing to use them, provided directly by other open source components in the platform (e.g. GStreamer). Developers will be of course free to use them, at the expense of loosing compatibility with Symbian, and with MeeGo… depends on the component and to be seen as soon as there is a detailed MeeGo architecture public. Then there will be the obvious difference in packaging (deb still for Harmattan, rpm for MeeGo) but this won’t be the big issue and anyway compatibility with Symbian implies specific packaging as well.

For those caring about the platform in depth, Harmattan =! MeeGo. If we would make Harmattan identical to MeeGo then we would need to postpone dates and, really not for a good reason. Not a reason for app developers (the API is there anyway) and not a good reason for end users, who could not care less about packaging and some obscure middleware components. This is the only reason making Ari Jaaksi refer to Harmattan as a “MeeGo instance” instead of just “MeeGo product”.

This is why we are dropping the “Maemo 6″ *brand* while keeping all the Harmattan development full speed and in the same direction that it was.”If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

New N900 Firmware PR 1.1.1 version 3.2010.02-8 Now Available

Vaibhav Sharma — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:05:07 +0000

The Nokia N900 has received a new firmware in the form of PR 1.1.1 (version 3.2010.02-8). This looks like a minor update and is available as an image from N900 firmware section as well as over the air if you search for updates. The OTA option is a 16.2 MB download and looks like a precursor to the major PR 1.2 update.

This update adds a number of regions to the N900, as quite a number of countries were earlier missing from the N900’s list. Apart from that there is no changelog available. I will update this post if I see something new.

The changelog is now available here, this firmware fixes the battery drain issue when connected to WIFI and browser improvements among other minor things.

Update: If you get a memory error while trying to update the N900 over the air, trying rebooting the device once. If that still doesn’t solve your problem then disable the Extras-Devel and Extras-Testing repositories and try again.

Update 2: The update is also available via the Nokia Software Updater, however when you update using it, you will loose your applications and settings, while the contacts and other data including photos will remain intact. So please make sure you backup before you update.

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